Filmoria:With Nightcrawler, Gilroy has confirmed himself as a truly ambitious and audacious talent. This is a stunningly constructed, remarkably contextualised picture that leaks brilliance from every tarnished vein. It is a visceral American masterpiece.

More importantly, Gilroy and Gyllenhaal fully commit to their crazed central character’s irredeemability, following him deep into hell and never once looking back toward the light. How perversely giddy it is to watch a demon thrive in his element.

Gyllenhaal is the polestar of Nightcrawler — just as he's fixated on the grisly crimes and accidents of his city, we can't look away from him. That seems to be part of writer-director Gilroy's design. He's infused Nightcrawler with a number of ideas, free-floating through the movie like fireflies: Gilroy takes on the news media's lust for increasingly prurient stories and graphic news footage, the way crimes against white people take precedence over anything that happens to a person of color, and the downside of citizen journalism in a world where everyone wants to be a star. But on the strength of Gyllenhaal's performance, Nightcrawler works best as a character study. It's chilling, but also wickedly funny and strange, like a good, dark Brian De Palma joke — in short, it's everything the stolid and humorless Gone Girl should have been.

Gyllenhaal: Are you talking about during the movie? (Everyone laughs!) Yes and no, but there’s some strange safety for me, which is probably a bit dangerous when you’re making a movie and you’re using it all for your work. Like, I’m sure if you’re writing a piece, or you’re putting a piece together, I have a goal with the thing I’m doing and somehow all those other feelings get channeled into the product that you’re trying to create. So, somehow it’s not as dangerous a little bit… but, I’m doing a movie with Jean-Marc Vallée (“Demolition”) right now and we were in a car and he’s operating and he’s in the passenger’s seat with the camera and I’m driving the car. We don’t have a rig or anything like that. We’re driving on the highway and he’s like, “Drive faster!” Yeah we’re all like, yeah faster! Wait, I’m like, “We’re making a movie.” There is that that happens. So, I don’t know if that answers your question.

#NightcrawlerMovie has received the Critics' Choice Seal of Distinction from the Broadcast Film Critics Association!

Do you think there's anyone left to pay to see NC after all these free screenings? LOL.

I must say the Open Road folks did up their game with the promotion finally. It's been fun to see it unfold.

Jess, I know! Not even a little bit of a hint of a song. He's no fun sometimes!

I liked the first timer, too.

I also loved the last video, which might have gone up while you were reading. The upside-down one. Lots of good stuff in all of them, even if the Important Unimportant Coyote Falling Cat motif does repeat :)

Jake Gyllenhaal was touching on the ultimate in thespian esoterica on Monday night: method acting.

“I think there’s a place in which you respect your own emotions and explorations,” he explained softly. “It becomes wider, deeper when you’re allowed to go in the dark. The irony is you can always bring light, you know?” Huh?

They were GyllenBabbled!

This is annoying:

Yet it seems Gyllenhaal has totally exorcised Bloom, and his grasp on the reporter mind-set. “That question’s redundant. Next question,” the actor deadpanned when one reporter on the carpet asked what the strangest encounter Gyllenhaal had had with a tabloid videographer (à la TMZ) was. A few feet down, another reporter brought up Taylor Swift, who had released her poppy new album “1989,” earlier that day. Gyllenhaal bristled, staring blankly at the reporter for a moment before sidestepping to the next one. (OK, fair).

We hear the couple’s security team “swept” a cinema at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square on Monday afternoon in anticipation of the rapper and the diva showing up to support their pal Jake Gyllenhaal during the premiere of his new thriller, “Nightcrawler.”

Upon arrival, the pair was whisked up to the theater in a private elevator, though they then huddled outside the cinema’s main doors as guests were ushered by.

After posing with Gyllenhaal, Jay and Bey sat next to him in a back row, then dashed off when the credits rolled.

We hear they’d previously requested a copy of the film be sent to them in Paris, which arrived under strict lock-and-key.

What a lame article that reporter asking questions that had nothing to do with the movie guess he just wanted to get a rise out of Jake and then to make it look like it's Jake's fault that he didn't have a sense of humor. Glad his person with him pulled him away from any more dumb questions.

The Gyllenaissance: 5 Recent Roles That Have Re-Established Jake Gyllenhaal's Career

It's a slight to Jake to employ this term, as the author points out, his low was never that low. But I'm just happy someone figured out how to make the word. People kept saying "Gyllenhaalaissance," which makes no sense, since "REN"aissance/"GYLLEN"haal. It's not so hard.

Jake was always at the top of the list of people who I wanted to play Lou. But when I first finished it, Jake wasn't available. He was circling some other projects. It took a number of months but then his schedule opened up and I flew to Atlanta where he was finishing up "Prisoners." We had a four-hour dinner where we just realized that this was a right fit and we both wanted to do it.

What about him made you so sure that he was the right person?

Well, one I, like many people, have been tracking his career since "Brokeback Mountain" and feel like he's one of the finest actors alive today. I became even more interested in Jake's career when "End of Watch" came out. I was just fascinated by that character that he created. When I flew to Atlanta and I understood what he was doing with "Prisoners," I just felt Jake was one of the most committed, talented, and fearless actors working today. I very, very much wanted him to play Lou. So I was extraordinarily happy when he signed on.

You starred in the film and produced it, so what was your input to the story?

Moralistically you need a lot of eyes on it. The structure of the screenplay on it, the tact in the film was so strong, there are things that lined up so well. He’s filling up the gas tank, I go “Hi, and say you pour gas on the car. We did six talks, in two of the takes I was screaming my f**ing head off the next take that was used was … we were all over the map. The scene in the mirror, he breaks the mirror, we were doing that everywhere. Moralistically how far can this guy go? Can he push that hard all the way over to this side, Okay let’s now make him charming and likeable. Sometimes what about that take, we were constantly a conversation about, and I was always pushing… I will give another example, the First scene where I fight the guy with the watch. We shot me beating the shit out of the guy and it just didn’t work. So in the end you just see his watch and then if you really got me with the watch at the end. I said to Dan – he got a shot of the watch, not I the first cut “Where is the watch?” and he said “yeah, we had it” and then I say “Dude you have to get the watch”. There was always that kind of discussion. It’s a testament to Dan being a great dictator, is that he was a fearless collaborator. Ideas came and he’d say no to many of them, but he’d know something good. I memorised the whole movie like a play because we were shooting in 25 days and if I wasn’t agile in those soliloquies, we were going to be f**ked, waste time so it was memorised. When we were on a setup, I would ask Dan if I could do the monologues into the camera, and in different locations we’d do that. He later cut that together and marketed it for the movie in a couple of trailers. He was so thoughtful and fearless.

To take on the look of a hungry coyote, the actor dropped 30 pounds; he’d often run 15 miles to the set to maintain his figure. The weight loss was a big choice, but it’s really just a part of a long list of ambitious decisions made by Gyllenhaal.

“One day Jake says to me, ‘I’m gonna put my hair up in a bun. Is that cool? I’m gonna wear this twisty thing around my wrist, too,'” Dan Gilroy recollects while on the concept of enthusiasm. “I was, like, ‘Yeah, let’s try it!’ There were other people involved in the film who didn’t understand at first. People were going, ‘Ah, Jesus, he’s putting his hair up in a fucking bun again! What the hell?’ I just said, ‘Hey man, this is going to work.” If it didn’t work, Gilroy adds, the choice would’ve fallen on its face.

It may seem strange or minor, but the writer/director isn’t joking about the befuddled reactions that hair bun drew. It’s not the first time a choice on Gyllenhaal’s part has drawn that kind of response, though. “Do you know how terrifying something like that eye tic is to a director, producer, and financier?” asks Gilroy, referring to Gyllenhaal’s performance as Detective Loki in last year’s Prisoners. “They just start to flip out, like, ‘He wants to have an eye tic? What the hell does that mean! How often are the eyes going to tic?’ These are the things Jake will fight for. I was right there with him.”

Gilroy respected his process, which, speaking with the actor himself, is obviously one he takes very seriously.

“Yeah, the hair thing…” Gyllenhaal says, before bursting out into laughter. “I didn’t even realize that was going to register, but the hair thing was my ninja take on the whole thing. When he’s deciding he’s going to rock it out and do something bad or something he’s going to get away with, he puts his hair up. He doesn’t want it to get in the way, he’s a ninja.”

Sorry for the flood of posts, but I love hearing about what other filmmakers think of Jake and about the behind-the-scenes freak outs of the money people.

Also, Twitter is crazy today. So many Ellen reactions, Jay and Bey mentions, reviews, articles. No way to see if someone spotted Jake having coffee!

Dan Gilroy, writer-director of the Los Angeles noir "Nightcrawler," knew his star, Jake Gyllenhaal, had entered an adventurous new phase as an actor. But he still didn't foresee the sudden emergence of a hair tie.

"One day he goes, 'Can I put my hair up in a bun?'" recalls Gilroy. "And you're looking at him like, 'Oh my god, he's putting his hair up in a bun." ...

The bun (which Gilroy, supportive of his actor, acknowledges was briefly "a political football") is only one detail that further inflates Lou's unique creepiness, but it's a telling one. It's an example of Gyllenhaal's eagerness for experimentation and newfound confidence as an actor.

"He's made a conscious decision to go for unconventional material that challenges him and challenges the audience," says Gilroy, brother of "Michael Clayton" director Tony Gilroy and husband to Renee Russo, who co-stars in "Nightcrawler" as local news producer. "He's one of the most fearless actors alive. I don't think he's afraid of failure. I think he's afraid of mediocrity."

Forgot to say that was good news from Fandango, even if NC doesn't match Prisoners.

As an Oscar-nominated actor, "Nightcrawler" star Jake Gyllenhaal is used to being photographed by people he doesn't know. He also turns the tables on occasion and shoots photos of strangers himself.The star says if he sees someone wearing an outfit he thinks will work for a character he's playing, he'll take a snap."I saw this guy with a camera on Sunset Boulevard, one of these big hulking cameras, wearing this crazy outfit and I pulled my car around in a U-turn and started to follow him to try and take a picture of him and he thought I was crazy," Gyllenhaal said at last month's Toronto International Film Festival. ...

"Nightcrawler" seems to be a passion project for all involved and received strong reviews during the film festival. It's just the latest in a series of edgy roles taken on by Gyllenhaal, who is now working with Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee on the upcoming "Demolition."

He's employing his usual costume research.

"I saw this guy somewhere and he was wearing a thing that I thought was really interesting and I took a picture of him and the guy thought I was a total weirdo and I sent it to Jean-Marc and said 'What do you think?" said Gyllenhaal."I asked this one guy the other day and he looked at me like I was like totally nuts and I was like, no I'm an actor ... and he was like, OK, dude."

This kind of review makes me happy, but at the same time sad to think that this performance and the film will not get recognition because they don't have $$$

I do think Jake can come off as humorless - I thought the hallucination question was funny. OTOH, who knows how obnoxious the NYDN reporter was.

Have to take into consideration that this man is promoting a movie, traveling to various places while shooting Demolition and rehearsing for a play. I think he just didn't want to waste time with stupid questions; he doesn't want to take the focus from movie to talk about something that is not real. Jake did well. He seems in good spirits, despite probably being tired.

I didn't know what was going to happen in Nightcrawler, and I couldn't stop watching; Gilroy and Gyllenhaal's Lou Bloom is a character both of the moment and of the ages, a regular guy looking to make a few bucks and become a "job creator" even as he's also Richard the III for the 24-7 news age with all the lumps, bumps and twisty bits hidden on the inside. In the two, three weeks of time between having actually seen Nightcrawler, and writing this review, I've seen would-be Oscar contenders and dumb big-money spectacles, good movies and bad, each worth discussing in the cool clear light of day -- but it's Nightcrawler and Lou I find myself thinking of the most, late at night, swimming up from some darkness unbidden to haunt me.

Wow. Congrats to Dan, Jake and company.

The RT is up over 90 now, though both AO Scott and Richard Roeper gave it middling reviews. So we'll see how things play out before tomorrow.

You’ve obviously cut your hair since filming. The man-bun you sport in the movie almost deserves a best-supporting-actor nod.

The hairstyle is something we came up with. I thought of Lou as a ninja or, at least, that’s the way he considered himself. When it was time for him to get it work it was like: “Okay. Hair up. Ready.” There were times when I was tying my hair up with my knee on the steering wheel and Riz [Ahmed who plays Lou’s assistant Rick] was like: “Oh my God.”

Are you aware that the man-bun has been making a pretty big splash in the fashion world?

I wasn’t. Is it just called a bun if a woman wears it?

Yes. And a man-bun on a guy. You might want to consider growing it back.

Contributors

Jake Gyllenhaal

Jake is the kind of guy who can do a spot-on impression of someone you work with. He plays guitar and has a great voice. Kids and dogs love him. He loves his mom and sister and girlfriend. He's perfect. Too bad he's ugly. ~ Natalie Portman